Rod Dreher's Blog, page 4

Pride Going Before The Fall

Extraordinary e-mail from a reader in Mexico City, commenting on my “Quo Vadis, America?” post:

Good piece this morning, well stated. The disengagement of the American public from the American project — though not, at least on the right, from the idea of America — will be fatal for the republic if unreversed.Here in Mexico City there is obviously no celebration of the Fourth of July outside of what the local American Society is producing, but we do have very much in evidence the same forces that are laboring to bring the American experiment to an end — in the name of an alien and elite-imposed ideology that rejects the foundational values of the United States and Mexico alike. To illustrate, I am attaching here two photographs from the tail end of “pride” month — el mes de orgullo — here in Mexico City.

The one with the giant Mexican flag is from the Zocalo, the historic center plaza of the great city. This was the center of the old Aztec city as well — you have to imagine it ringed with stepped pyramids and human blood — and now it sports much more prosaic structures in the European style. The important thing is that they are festooned with what you see here: gigantic sexual-identity banners. This kind of thing doesn’t happen, on the Zocalo, without state endorsement.

The other photograph is of the building that houses the municipal legislature — basically the congress of Mexico City — and it too is draped with sexual-identity flags, this time at explicit government order. What does the Mexican state (presently under a brand of socialist-left leadership) endorse and promulgate? Well, it’s this. These are its core values. Note especially the centrality of the transgender flag, placed between the two rainbow flags. Whether it is meant to send a message or not, as metaphor it is near perfection.It’s quite extraordinary on several levels. The disconnect from Mexican history and the values that animated it is profound: the Mexican War for Independence began with an insurgent army carrying a banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and ended with a rebel army carrying a flag symbolizing the “Three Guarantees” of “Religión, Independencia y Unión” — by which was meant independent Mexico would be an explicitly Catholic state with liberal equality for all its citizens. It is impossible to reconcile its founding with this thing now: if anything, we could expect the heroes of Mexican independence in Morelos, Guerrero, Hidalgo, et al., to likely rise up against the current regime. Moving forward a century to the era of the Mexican Revolution, there is absolute certainty as to what socially conservative figures like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa would have thought.The disconnect from the Mexican present is equally profound. The Mexican state is generally agreed to have lost control of 30% to 40% of its sovereign territory to criminal cartels in the past ten to fifteen years. The middle class, ascendant a decade ago, is now staggering under a combination of insecurity and economic stagnation brought on by a combination of endemic armed conflict and leftist-governance bungling. You can’t wander Mexico City, as I have, without eventually encountering some heartbreaking plea — expressed in a protest encampment, a poster, or a permanent exhibit — for children and loved ones who have been “disappeared” by the military, by police, or by criminal cartels, assuming there is much difference. The murder rate here is spiking (which, in a Mexican context, is really saying something), and business is fleeing. Mexico, which possesses immeasurable potential in its extraordinary people, grand cultural inheritance, and immense natural riches, is gripped in existential crisis.So what does the regime here focus on? Rainbow and transgender flags. There was a big “pride” march last Sunday where the mayor — and likely next Mexican president — Claudia Sheinbaum, appeared. Sure, your neighborhoods in Itzapalapa are wracked by crime, no one in the city has clean drinking water from the municipal supply, and someone executed a group of young men in tourist-favorite Coyoacan last week, but just look at what the city provides now. You can change your gender identity on government documents! You can marry someone of the same sex! The city runs sex-change clinics! We’re painting crosswalks in rainbow colors!

Hemos otorgado más de 6 mil actas de identidad de género, se han celebrado más de 100 bodas igualitarias y se ha atendido a más de 3 mil 600 personas en la Clínica Trans.

En la Ciudad de las libertades, la diversidad es un orgullo.#ViveTuOrgullo

¡Buenas noches! pic.twitter.com/5Glr2qkOmY

— Claudia Sheinbaum (@Claudiashein) June 29, 2022

This leads me to the final disconnect at work here, which is that none of this is even remotely indigenous to Mexico. Everything above will be broadly familiar to Americans who live under a similar regime — with the exception that we are blessedly free, so far, from Mexico-level ultra-violence — that pushes its ideology of sexual libertinism with aggression even as the pillars of middle-class lives and dignity are kicked away. But to our shame, we originated this stuff. Mexico has a robust leftist tradition, to be sure: much of the 1920-1940 period was spent with the Mexican state executing priests and flirting with Soviet Communism. But that tradition is very much focused upon an industrial-left agenda — labor unions and class struggle — that would be very familiar to the middle of the twentieth century.Modern American progressivism, which casts most of that agenda aside in favor of an obsession with gender ideology, is not native to this country. That madness was formulated in humanities departments in Boston and San Francisco, not in parishes in Morelos, nor in neighborhoods in Sonora. It was imported and adopted by a Mexican elite for whom concurrence with Acela Corridor values is more personally important than the stewardship of their own nation.Sure, those Mexican elites are at fault. But so are we. I grew up in an America where foreign nations could come to learn about democracy, about good governance, about representation of the people: call it the “Hello Freedom Man!” country. We exported all that, consciously, and we were good at it. A good portion of the globe lives in relative liberty now thanks to us, and I take great pride in that. But now we export the rainbow ideology with all its evils to deeply vulnerable and stricken lands — and this, on the Fourth of July, is also a source of shame.

https://twitter.com/USAmbMex/status/1541872633108742144https://twitter.com/USEmbassyMEX/status/1542578945241088001https://twitter.com/USEmbassyMEX/status/1542534226628804609

The post Pride Going Before The Fall appeared first on The American Conservative.

Quo Vadis, America?

Two tweets about American on this Independence Day. The first is from a drag restaurant in Miami, which is in Florida, a state that has a sane governor and a department of child protective services, from which we should be hearing soon:

These people belong in jail.

This is a hill I’m willing to die on. pic.twitter.com/vi3NQiTnrv

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) July 3, 2022

There is our future, America, if we stay on this path.  A trans stripper leading a child down the primrose path is a condensed symbol for the road to hell down which our country is walking. Seems like there’s a new moral and cultural low every day here in a country led by a Democratic president who said that advancing the goals of groomers like the trans stripper above is “the civil rights issue of our time.” It is hard to believe that the Democratic Party as well as the entire ruling class of the USA has been captured by decadence to this degree. But here we are.

Which brings us to the second tweet:

100 year old veteran break down crying

“This is not the country we fought for” pic.twitter.com/W7Y8XsKLp0

— WilliamA33 (@WilliamA_33) July 2, 2022

I think the old man speaks for a lot of us. In fact, I know so. Gallup just released a poll showing that Americans’ pride in their country is at unprecedented lows. Excerpts:

The 38% of U.S. adults who say they are “extremely proud” to be American is the lowest in Gallup’s trend, which began in 2001. Still, together with the 27% who are “very proud,” 65% of U.S. adults express pride in the nation. Another 22% say they are “moderately proud,” while 9% are “only a little” and 4% “not at all” proud.

This record-low level of extreme national pride comes at a challenging time in the U.S. as a pandemic-weary public is struggling with the highest U.S. inflation rate in more than four decades.

To be fair, the numbers are still very, very high compared to the sentiment in, say, Europe, where people have been taught to fear and loathe nationalism ever since World War II. Still:

Before 2015, no less than 55% of U.S. adults said they were extremely proud. The highest readings followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when patriotism surged in the U.S.

However, extreme national pride in the U.S. has been trending downward since 2015, falling below the majority level in 2018; it is nearly 20 points lower now than it was a decade ago.

The year 2015 is when wokeness started its conquering march through the institutions. One last clip:

Republicans’ pride in being American has consistently outpaced Democrats’ and independents’ since 2001 and does so today. However, Republicans’ extreme national pride (58%) is now at its lowest point in the trend. Independents’ extreme pride, at 34%, is likewise the lowest on record for the group.

We have become a country ruled in many public and most major private institutions by people who hate its founding ideals, who hate its traditional liberties and moral norms, who hate the race of the majority of people in this country and who wish to stir up racial hatred among us, who hate orthodox forms of the religion of a majority of its people, and who are busy destroying the pillars of national life and cleansing the memories of the next generation so they will forget what America ever was. One party promotes this, and the other party is too cowardly or otherwise disengaged to defend their own country’s traditions. The business class is all in on celebrating decadence. The military-industrial complex and the foreign policy elites want to spread it throughout the West. The light unto the nations has turned itself into the neon filaments of the trans strippers’ neon.

What is it going to take to make America great again? It’s not going to be politics alone. Some Evangelical I follow on Twitter, can’t remember who, tweeted the other day that he changed his view of seminary education when he heard someone say that churches should be preparing people to face persecution. I forget his phrasing, but the point was not about predicting persecution, but rather talking about effective discipleship. Persecution may not come, but we should prepare ourselves to be able to thrive if it did.

I think the principle can be generalized. We have forgotten what it takes to maintain a resilient civilization. You know my line on this, so I’m not going to go into it again. This morning I’m thinking about a paper I just read from a mainstream social scientist I know and trust, predicting an “existential crisis” for our civilization based on the collapse of family formation and sexual dynamics. The paper will be published soon, and I’ll discuss it here when it comes out. His basic claim, citing social science data, and historical comparisons, is that societies that have a large number of young men without mating prospects is a society given over to violent crime and social instability. Nations that have had to deal with this problem in the past have occupied these men with war and colonialism, to channel that energy externally. The social scientist’s point is that the Sexual Revolution is having, and will continue to have, massive downstream effects. Nobody wants to hear that because it goes against the Narrative, but it happens to be demonstrable from the data.

In 2020, I wrote about this phenomenon — that is, of the future of the nation depending on strong families, and how we are busy sabotaging that. Excerpt:

Here’s a fascinating article from New York magazine on the massive gender gap between Trump and Biden supporters. It contains this eye-popping claim, buried deep down:

Neither the societal shift away from traditional gender roles nor the downstream cultural consequences of that shift are anywhere near complete. As Rebecca Traister has incisively argued, the growing prevalence of singledom among America’s rising generation of women is one of the most potent forces in contemporary politics. In 2009, for the first time in history, there were more unmarried women in the United States than married ones. And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprecedentedly single; they also appear to be unprecedentedly uninterested in heterosexuality: According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent.

David Shor is one of the best data people the Democratic Party people has. Take this seriously.

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay , bisexual, or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years.  The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration. Yesterday, on the Al Mohler podcast, I talked about going to a conservative Evangelical college a few years back, and hearing from professors there that they feared most of their students would never be able to form stable families, because so many of them had never seen what that’s like.

And now we have 30 percent of Gen Z women claiming to be sexually uninterested in men. There is nothing remotely normal about that number. It is a sign of a deeply decadent culture — that is, a culture that lacks the wherewithal to survive. The most important thing that a generation can do is produce the next generation. No families, no children, no future.

In 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman, then the head of Harvard’s sociology department, wrote a book called Family And Civilization. He was not a religious man; he was only interested in the cultural values that allowed civilizations to thrive, and those that caused civilizations to collapse. His general thesis is that family systems determine the strength and resilience of a civilization. Zimmerman wrote:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

And:

The only thing that seems certain is that we are again in one of those periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work. The problem has existed before. The basic nature of this illness has been diagnosed before. After some centuries, the necessary remedy has been applied. What will be done now is a matter of conjecture. We may do a better job than was done before; we may do a worse one.

He wrote this in 1947. Zimmerman missed the Baby Boom coming, but otherwise, he was right on target.

Earlier this year, David Brooks wrote a big piece for The Atlantic in which he observed that we are living through the most rapid change in the structure of the family in human history. In the piece, Brooks writes:

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”

Sex is also primarily about individual fulfillment — and maybe solely about individual fulfillment. Young people today see no connection between sex, family, and a greater purpose. I wrote about this more or less in a 2013 essay, “Sex After Christianity,” that remains one of the most read pieces I’ve ever published here at TAC. In his book, the sociologist Zimmerman, in listing the signs of a dying civilization, mentions a decline in family formation and a rise in homosexuality. Again, he was not a religious man, but his social science convictions led him to conclude that from studying the historical records of ancient Greece and Rome.

It’s far too simplistic to say “homosexuality brought down Rome.” Homosexuality didn’t mean the same thing in those societies that it means in ours. More importantly, the idea is that the greater tolerance for and acceptance of homosexuality was an indicator of the collapse of the shared belief that forming families to produce the next generation was the most important purpose of the civilization, and that a culture’s structures and norms should be constructed to support that mission.

In other words, the acceptance of homosexuality, and now of transgenderism, is more of an effect of radical individualism than a cause. This is why, back in 2005, I recognized that because we conservatives had lost the culture war around sex and sexuality, we were rapidly going to lose the culture war over gay marriage and all the rest. I got a lot of criticism from my allies on the religious right for my alleged “defeatism”. I didn’t enjoy being right about this, but I saw that opposition to normalizing same-sex marriage was thin, because IF marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment (and not childrearing), THEN there is no strong reason to oppose same-sex marriage. Similarly, IF sex is not rooted in transcendent values, and is therefore seen as about nothing more than adult fulfillment, THEN there is no strong reason to stigmatize any sexual practice, aside from consent (which entails age).

And now, having sliced through all the muscle, we are carving into the bone. IF freedom means the right to change your gender to satisfy individual desire, THEN society must be taught that sex is malleable, and “transition” must be normalized and celebrated.

This is how you get abominations like the trans stripper corrupting the child, whose horrible parents took her to the drag show.

Look, I know that as a man who woke up one morning in April to find out that his wife had filed for divorce, I am implicated in the collapse of family. I have to own that. It rips my heart out, but this is the reality I am living today. And it doesn’t make anything I say above less true. It just means that it’s very hard to escape this trauma, even if you are a Nice Conservative Family Values Christian.

The English writer Mary Harrington last year wrote a provocative essay about “how Satanism conquered America.” Her point is not some religious-right ooga-booga claim (though you know how much I love that kind of things). Rather, her point is that Lucifer was the original radical individualist, the figure who insisted that he didn’t have to live by any laws that weren’t self-chosen. She wrote:

But if devilish imagery mostly feels a bit cringe, the Devil himself has gone mainstream. If being deliberately anti-Christian pour épater la bourgeoisie feels exhausted, for the new, post-Christian bourgeoisie Satan now reads like the good guy. And in the hands of this class, the Devil’s proverbial pride, self-regard and refusal to yield isn’t just celebrated — it’s on its way to becoming the established religion of the United States of America.

More:

Fast forward another century on, and it’s not such a big step from thinking God’s grace gives you the freedom to do what you want, to dispensing with the God bit. The occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) pursued a doctrine of individual will unconstrained by law or stuffy morality. He called himself “The Beast 666”, experimented with sex and drugs and in 1923 was expelled from Sicily after an associate died in mysterious circumstances, reportedly after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat.

We tend to think of such deliberately shocking behaviour as the essence of “Satanism”. But Crowley’s core legacy was stripping the last remnants of Christianity from antinomian rebellion. His most famous dictum, written in The Book of the Law (1909), was: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

He wasn’t the only one. Already in 1882, Friedrich Nietszche declared God dead and the human will to power as the only real source of good. In America, meanwhile, the individualist celebration of mankind became ever less Christian. Though she disavowed him later, the American writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982), called Nietzsche her “favourite philosopher” in the 1930s. Rand’s doctrine, Objectivism, argues selfishness is both noble and good: “It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want,” argues one character in Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead, “And it takes the greatest kind of courage”.

Both Crowley and Rand pursued the liberation of individual will from taboo, custom, law and even (as practitioners of ceremonial magic hoped) reality itself. These influences fused again in 1966 California, with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Lavey drew on both Rand and Crowley to reject all collectivist constraints on individual behaviour and emphasise the primacy of individual desire. “There is a beast in man,” he declared, “that should be exercised, not exorcised.”

And:

Milton saw Satan’s refusal to submit to any law (however ambivalently) as the sin of pride. Now, in our post-Christian world of self-actualisation, pride is no longer a sin. Rather, it’s a vital part of becoming fully yourself. As body modification micro-celebrity Farrah Flawless put it: “I do not believe in God, I don’t worship the Devil, but yes I am a Satanist which means I am my own god. I worship myself’.

Indeed, it’s so far from being a sin that sacralised self-worship now has an annual religious festival. This new, increasingly pseudo-religious summer event, simply known as “Pride Month”, may have started out as a twentieth-century campaign for gay and lesbian equality. But what began as a justified and (at root deeply Christian) campaign for equal treatment for gay and lesbian people has long since morphed into a corporate-sponsored celebration of individualism that today horrifies many gay and lesbian people.

Pinterest, the internet’s motherlode of self-help platitudes, succinctly summed up the new faith in an official post this year. As a religious holiday, Pride isn’t about gay rights; it’s where we “celebrate identity and self-expression in all its forms”. Inasmuch as Milton’s ambivalence about rebellion lives on, it’s in the now-traditional argument about whether there are any forms of individual desire still off-limits for proud celebration.

The next wall to fall will be against pedophilia. The groomers like that trans stripper above are already working, in collaboration with bad parents, to sexualize the imaginations of children.

I’ve written before about how painful it is as an America to travel to Central European countries and see the Pride flag flying from American embassies. Majorities in countries likeWe are exporting  Poland and Hungary see this as America displaying contempt for them. And they’re correct. From Politico last week:

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), another member of the delegation, was in Lithuania earlier this week to accept an award from its parliament, which is currently considering legislation to legalize same-sex civil unions.

Durbin recalled telling members of Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda’s staff that “these are values that are important to America, that even the Supreme Court, nine people in the United States, shouldn’t suggest otherwise … They don’t reflect public opinion.”

“It is not just an American decision. We have led the world in many respects, not exclusively, in expansion of the rights of women,” Durbin added. “And I think this [ruling] really raises a question as to our commitment in the future.”

 

This is a senior Democrat telling foreigners that returning abortion to the realm of democratic debate is a mistake — this, despite the fact that nearly every European country has more conservative abortion laws than American under Roe. In Lithuania, for example, abortion is forbidden after twelve weeks, but can be permitted for medical reasons up to 22 weeks — but not after that. Our Democratic Party leadership is overseas evangelizing other nations for the family-killing policies of radical abortion deregulation and LGBT normalization. The United States of America uses its unparalleled state, economic (through private corporations) and cultural power to export the diseases that are killing us.

A Hungarian political scientist told me recently that the most current polling data show that the Hungarian people, who are famously pessimistic, are more confident and optimistic about their country than Americans are right now. I told my son that this is what it felt like to be an American in the late 1970s.

We know what happened next. I hope history will give us a new Reagan, one who is right for our time, as Ronald Reagan was right for his. But we cannot expect a politician to save us, not when our institutions are so corrupt — either actively corrupt or demoralized into passivity. My friend Tish Harrison Warren is more to the left than I am, but I completely agree with her column today saying that conservative Christians should consider economic solidarity as a culture war issue. And I guess because I am in Budapest on this sweltering July morning on the Danube, I am obliged to tell you that Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been there for some time on this issue. He sees social conservatism and economic populism as a winning program — and so do voters, who have elected him four times in a row.

This is the winning program for Republicans. You can’t have one without the other, though. And, as Orban once said, a politician is limited in what he can do. A politician can change material factors, but he cannot give people meaning. This is something that comes from families, from churches, from schools, and from cultural institutions. Unless we Americans are able and willing to renew ourselves, looking to a political savior is a dangerous illusion.

I love my country, but we are in sorry shape. May God raise up men and women who have had enough of living by the lies that the ruling class wants us to affirm, and by the deep lie shared by most of us: that true freedom is the right to do whatever we like.

Maybe Heidegger, the atheist philosopher, was right in his posthumously published interview in Der Spiegel, 1966: that the problems of modern Western civilization are so immense that “only a god can save us.” I believe it. What we are seeing now, so clear that it can no longer be denied, is that we Americans will serve either Lucifer, or God. There is no middle ground. And, to borrow from Solzhenitsyn, the line between Lucifer and God does not pass between political parties, races, classes, churches, or anything like that; that line passes down the middle of every human heart.

May God bless America, though we have turned our back on Him. There is still time to return to our Father’s house before He allows us to get what we have chosen. But repentance requires first having a realistic assessment of how far we have fallen. I wish you a pleasant Fourth of July — my son Matt and I will be raising a glass to our country later tonight — but I also wish for us all some real metanoia.

The post Quo Vadis, America? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Himmler’s Kidswear, By Celine Dion

“Our children. They are not really our children.”

This is extinction-level goth insanity. Himmler must be dancing a jig in hell under his beloved Black Sun, knowing we’re watching this stuff up here.

And people wonder why there are culture wars.

pic.twitter.com/zPXhTZ0J0k

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) July 3, 2022

Walter Kirn isn’t a conservative or a culture warrior. He’s a novelist who lives in Montana. And he’s right about this. You’ve got to see it to believe it. It’s satanic. Celine Dion came out in 2018 with a gender-neutral line of clothing for kids that ought to be sold in Hell’s Walmart. Maybe it didn’t do well, I dunno. But holy cow, it’s evil stuff. Check out this thread:

Celine Dion teamed up with tel Aviv and released a gender neutral clothing line for kids and babies in 2018 called Célinununu. It has kind of

flown under the radar, but hey let’s take a look at this high fashion available to you and your children. Walk with me.

— THE Red-Headed libertarian (@TRHLofficial) July 2, 2022

Some shots from the thread:

 

 

Well, I dunno about controlling the world’s financial systems, but the one-eye is definitely used as a symbol of the occult. Here is the actress-occultist Asia Argento flashing the sign on her Insta in 2017:

Nununu says of its clothing:

nununu creates an alternative fashion line to typical children’s clothing. it goes against fashion’s narrow set of beliefs, and breaks free from over-stimulating kid clichés. by introducing children to the wonderful mystery of minimalism, nununu lets kids shine at every stage with a kickass cocktail of attitude and a big sense of humor.

the nununu image conveys an air of detachment. it is never cute or sweet, but always ready for the challenge. the brand operates in a way where instead of defining differences it dissolves them, blurring out any boundaries and making divisions completely insignificant.

From the brand’s Instagram:

By the way, before you start accusing me of nutpicking an obscure clothing brand to make a big fuss over, you should know that Nununu is sold at Sakes Fifth Avenue, Nordstroms, and other top retailers, and has a celebrity following. Kirn is right: this is why we have culture wars.

One more thing: you might remember the Anglican seminarian I wrote about in this space recently, the one who worked in advertising in London before he entered seminary. He told me, and I wrote here, that he didn’t know a single atheist in his office, but not another Christian either. Everybody was into some form of the occult, including satanism, which they believed to be fulfilling your most complete self. When I saw the Celine Dion ad, and the ads and images for Nununu, I found this claim even easier to believe.

The post Himmler’s Kidswear, By Celine Dion appeared first on The American Conservative.

Chris Rufo, Another Defender Of The Normies

From a must-read interview with Christopher Rufo:

Daniel Miller: One of the persistent issues faced by opposition activists is the problem of defining the contemporary regime. You’ve successfully popularized the term Critical Race Theory to characterize the current regime ideology, but how do you see the relationship between this ideology and the big corporate and political forces promoting it? Do you view them as motivated by sincere ideological commitments?

Christopher Rufo: There are the true believers, but for most people, it is a rationalization. The executives at Xerox and Walmart are not sincerely committed to CRT, but the entire incentive structure that surrounds them creates an enormous pressure to adopt these beliefs, at least as status markers or reputational insurance policies. It is much easier to bend the knee for George Floyd and write a $10 million check to BLM than to say “no.” For conservatives, we have to realize that the game is not to debate the epiphenomenon of ideology, but to relentlessly unearth, attack and dislodge the broader structural phenomenon that underpins it. This means attacking it on moral, aesthetic, financial, legal, and bureaucratic grounds, in addition to the more straightforward style of intellectual debate. Governor DeSantis understands this better than anyone. He demonstrated in his fight against Disney that conservatives have leverage against corporate power, as long as they are willing to use it. The trick is to replicate that strategy across multiple domains and to shift incentives by changing the law.

More:

Mark Granza: You’re often credited with single-handedly convincing President Trump to issue an Executive Order against CRT. Many Trump supporters today wish he would have been harsher against the Left during his time in office. Where do you think the next Republican candidate should improve on Trump’s policies with regard to the larger fight against Progressivism?

Christopher Rufo: President Trump was a wrecking ball to American politics. This was salutary. It shook conservatives out of an old consensus and opened up new possibilities for public policy. Trump listened to my call on CRT in the federal government and took immediate action against it. Unfortunately, this was in the final months of his term and President Biden reversed it on his first day in office. But more importantly, Trump changed the precedent and validated bringing the culture war to the federal bureaucracy. I have spent the past year thinking about how to expand on this campaign for the next time a Republican assumes the presidency. As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

Read the whole thing. Rufo is one of the most important political actors in America today. If the US conservative movement is going to have a future, it’s going to be created by Chris Rufo and those in his mold.

I’m in Budapest now, getting my visa situation for the European Union sorted. What Rufo says above reminds me very much of the strategy of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. I say that because I’ve been reading a book called Orban Land, by a Danish journalist, Lasse Skytt, who is based in Hungary. I haven’t finished the book yet, but Skytt seems sympathetic to Orban, though at times is critical. Skytt writes in the beginning of the book that it took living here in Hungary for him to understand why so many Hungarians like Orban. Skytt quotes the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who says that in the modern world, “freedom” has become emptied out. We are free, but for what? All that’s left is technocracy.

Orban’s Hungary rejects that. Skytt talks about the 2015 migration crisis, and what he saw it did to the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen, where he was living. It was a disaster, with a massive brawl spilling out of the refugee camp there, with mobs running through the street shouting “Allahu akbar” and starting fires. The riot police had to be called in. This was the kind of thing that turned Orban into an anti-migration hard-liner. And his people approved.

He goes on to say that Western Europeans criticized the Hungarians for having a “lack of solidarity” with the migrants. This is true, says Skytt, but that doesn’t mean they lack solidarity. It’s just a different kind of solidarity than is held by western Europeans. Hungarians, like others in Central Europe, believe in solidarity, but they believe that their primary solidarity should be with their neighbors — that is, with each other. The Bulgarian social scientist Ivan Krastev calls this a “clash of solidarities.”

Skytt’s book came out in 2019, long before the Ukrainian war. In it, he says western Europeans were asking back in 2015 why Hungarians, who benefited from the charity of European countries welcoming them as refugees after the 1956 Soviet invasion, were being uncharitable to the migrants. The answer is simple: because not all migrants are the same. The 2015 migrants weren’t fellow Europeans seeking shelter. They were people from Africa and the Middle East who hold a different religion (in most cases) and a very different culture from the Hungarians and other peoples of Central Europe. Large numbers of migrants threatened their social stability and even their identity. Remember: clash of solidarities. You could see this again with the Hungarians welcoming Ukrainian war refugees this year. Christian Europeans can integrate much easier in Hungary than Afghani Muslims.

Skytt, quoting Krastev again, says that the general Hungarian approach is also a reaction to the 1960s and 1970s European liberal program focusing on expanding the rights of minorities. The Hungarians under Orban rather “are attempting to restore the rights of majorities.”

That strikes a resonant chord in me regarding our situation in the US. The American Left has so much contempt for the values of the majority in its own country. It has gone so far in pushing gender ideology and Critical Race Theory that now ordinary Americans are afraid to send their children to public schools, because they don’t know what kind of malignant nonsense they are going to be fed there. The Left has created a situation in which 58 percent of the US population — non-Hispanic whites — are demonized within elite networks and institutions. They do not believe in solidarity, the Left thinkers; they believe in building solidarity by demonizing races and groups that they hate — and call the attempt of those people to defend themselves and their interests, as any other ethnic group would, intolerable bigotry.

The US president famously called transgender rights “the civil rights issue of our time.” What this means in practice is that parents now have to worry about their children being taught queer theory in first grade. Now we have to face the fact that this weirdo is the new normal:

It’s official. As of June 19th, I now serve my nation as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy. pic.twitter.com/zLq3Bf97X2

— Sam Brinton (@sbrinton) June 29, 2022

Don’t like it? What are you, a bigot?! Off with your head!

Last year, Mary Harrington, a self-described “reactionary feminist” and one of the most exciting thinkers and writers around, penned this essay about how the Sexual Revolution killed feminism. In it, she writes:

The transgender writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recently observed that the campaigns for medical abortion and transgender surgeries have a great deal in common. This is correct. Both causes champion the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies. They are not feminist but bio-libertarian.

I disagree with Boylan only on whether this is desirable. Because conditions have now changed again. And our norms and laws haven’t caught up yet.

Bio-libertarian causes may have appeared in women’s emancipatory interests, in a broadly democratic consumer society. That era retained some shared social and cultural norms, along with a sincere belief that things could go on getting better, richer, freer, more comfortable forever. As such, working loose those old-fashioned social norms and physiological givens seemed an unalloyed good.

That world is gone. There are no shared norms. We’re past peak oil. Living standards are falling. So is life expectancy. Variously in the name of economic progress, digital disintermediation, Covid, net zero or the Great Reset, the middle class is being methodically cannibalised to shore up the 1%. Pluralism has birthed a Hobbesian moral anarchy, held together only by the technologies that mediate our meme wars.

This is the new normal and it’s not going away. Against this backdrop, the interests of men and women no longer align with the bio-libertarian agenda of mastery over the body.

There’s a reason I called Viktor Orban earlier this week “Defender of the Normies.” In his latest Substack newsletter (subscribe, you!), my podcasting colleague Kale Zelden writes about the absence of norms:

Norms are models, patterns, and standards. Not to be too cute, but they are normal, as in typical and everyday. But even “typical” evokes type or typos: a model for action or emulation. Norms are those exemplars from which we model our own behavior. They “rule” us, both in our ability to create and to judge. Rulers rule.

My first claim is that norms are inevitable.

Despite the cry of the various “alt” crowds, we have norms, we need norms, we cannot escape norms. We are living through an extended period in which norms are not only questioned and undermined, but that norms are somehow malignant or even “fascistic.” All the talk of “dismantling and disrupting systems and structures” is in essence norm-bashing. The very idea of norms is considered by a majority of our cultural manufacturing class as colonialist and patriarchal and evil. These norms are some nasty “legacy code” that needs to be rooted out and forgotten, banished into the void of forgetting. “If we are to make progress,” the thought runs, “we must free ourselves from the shackles of outmoded norms.” Norms are the enemy.

My second claim is that norms are necessary.

In our attempts to transcend or supersede these alleged fascistic vestiges of a bygone era, we render ourselves incapable of genuine living. We are unable to flourish nor are we able to create or pass on. We are unable to complete the puzzle. Without norms we cannot act. Or, to put it another way, norms are culture, and culture is an inheritance.

There has been a great breakdown in transmission. Instead of passing on an inheritance we have settled for impotent rebellion. That which must be “given” has not been granted. To be technical, we have taken for granted that which has been withheld. The gift has been both withheld and refused. This is a perilous situation. Absent transmission, we are unable to transition to maturity in all senses of that word.

In our current time, we are transitioning. We are always transitioning. Technically. You can only transition from something if you know where you are, and you can only transition to something if you have some sense of where you are hoping to arrive. Without norms—standards—we do not have a realizable sense or picture of what we are aiming for.

Orban unapologetically defends what was normal until the day before yesterday — and what still is normal in Hungary. And he doesn’t only defend it in his rhetoric; he acts — usually, Rufo-like, by understanding that the anti-normal forces are systemic, buried deep within institutions and elite networks.

Did you read Viktor Orban’s speech at CPAC Hungary? Here’s the full transcript. These excerpts bring Rufo’s strategy to mind (and, for that matter, Matt Walsh’s: what could be better than asking these liberal elites, “What is a woman?”, and watching them sputter?):

The first point in the Hungarian formula is to play by our own rules. The only way to win is to refuse to accept the solutions and the paths offered by others. As Churchill said, having enemies is a sure sign that you are doing something right. This is why we should not be discouraged by being defamed, by being branded as deplorable, or by being treated abroad like troublemakers. In fact, it would be suspicious if none of this happened. Please remember that those who play by their opponents’ rules are certain to lose.

The second point: national conservatism in domestic politics. The cause of the nation is not a matter of ideology, nor even of tradition. The reason that churches and families must be supported is that they are the building blocks of the nation. This also means that one must remain on the side of the voters. We decided to stop migration and build the wall on our southern border because Hungarians said that they did not want illegal immigrants. They said: “Viktor, build that wall!” Three months later the border barrier was up. The secret is not to overthink things: the Hungarian fence is a simple chain-link structure with motion detectors, watchtowers and cameras; but this is enough, provided people want to protect their country. The Achilles heel of progressives is precisely that they want to impose their dreams on society. But for us that danger is also an opportunity, because when it comes to important issues, in reality people do not like left-wing fever dreams. One must find the issues on which the Left is completely out of touch with reality and highlight them – but in a way that can be understood by people who are not eggheads.

Another:

Fifth point: expose your opponent’s intentions. As a condition for victory, media support is necessary, but not sufficient. We must also break down taboos. Perhaps I do not need to introduce this to my American friends, because what breaker of taboos is greater than President Donald Trump? But one can always raise the bar: we must not only break down today’s taboos, but also tomorrow’s taboos. Here in Hungary we expose what the Left are preparing before they even take action. At first they will deny it, but success is all the sweeter when it emerges that we were right all along. For instance, there is the issue of LGBTQ propaganda targeting children. This is still a new thing over here, but we have already destroyed it. We brought the issue out into the open and held a referendum on it. The overwhelming majority of Hungarians have rejected this form of sensitization of children. By revealing at an early stage what the Left were preparing for, we forced them on the defensive, and when they attacked our initiative they were eventually forced to admit the reality of their plan. Allow me to quote General Patton again: “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

Read the whole thing and you’ll understand why I believe so strongly that the rising generation of American conservatives who actually want to change things have a lot to learn from the Orban Way.

Meanwhile, what of the Left? David Brooks, who very much sympathizes with the Democratic Party these days, is aghast by how badly they’re blowing it. He writes in his column today:

The Democratic Party as a whole became associated with progressives who saw policing simply through a racial injustice lens. That’s an important lens, but progressives ignored the public safety lens and were unprepared for the widespread public anger over the increase in crime.

Similarly, many progressives argued that cancel culture wasn’t a thing or was being severely exaggerated. Americans who are afraid to think out loud think the left has become too censorious, and the Democratic Party once again is held guilty by association. Progressives have also largely failed to address the shortcomings of their governing model. The rampant inequality, homelessness and other social ills plaguing San Francisco and other cities are there for all to see.

We are living in an age of menace, an age when people feel unsafe on a variety of fronts. These are ages when voters tend to flock to conservative parties, which they associate with law and order.

And then there is the underlying problem, which has gone unaddressed sinceDonaldTrump surged to his unexpected victory in 2016, which is that while Democrats support many popular policies, progressives are associated with a series of social and cultural values that are unpopular with most Americans. According to a new More in Common survey, 69 percent of Americans believe that America is a country where if you get a good education, develop your talents and are open to innovation, you can do anything. Only 36 percent of progressive activists agree with this.

That’s just a basic difference in how people see the country, and time and time again Democratic politicians have been punished for the messages that come out of progressive educational and cultural institutions.

There will be no Sister Souljah moment from a Democratic politician today. They can’t do it. He, or she, would be massacred internally by the Left. If Joe Biden told Sam Brinton to put on a damn suit and tie to come to work running a major government office, he would be drawn and quartered in the media.

The conservative politician who understands his goal is to promote solidarity with the nation’s normies — you know, the ones with the standard norms — of all races (including rights of majorities), and that to advance the interests of normies, he has to go at structural progressivism with laser like focus, as well as with hammer and tongs, could be a truly transformative leader. Those GOP politicians who aspire to that should start learning from Christopher Rufo and Viktor Orban. The dogs of the liberal media will bark, but the caravan will move on.

If you want to see Rufo’s work, and understand why he is so effective, check out his website.

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You Can’t Eat The ‘Liberal World Order’

At the NATO summit, President Biden said that gas prices are so high because Putin invaded Ukraine. Actually, it’s because of the way Western leaders, including Joe Biden, chose to respond to Putin’s invasion: by cutting off Russian oil. In theory, it’s fine to boycott the oil of a nation to punish it for launching a war, but this doesn’t seem to be hurting Russia at all. In fact, according to The New York Times:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered global condemnation and tough sanctions aimed at denting Moscow’s war chest. Yet Russia’s revenues from fossil fuels, by far its biggest export, soared to records in the first 100 days of its war on Ukraine, driven by a windfall from oil sales amid surging prices, a new analysis shows.

Russia earned what is very likely a record 93 billion euros in revenue from exports of oil, gas and coal in the first 100 days of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, according to data analyzed by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a research organization based in Helsinki, Finland. About two-thirds of those earnings, the equivalent of about $97 billion, came from oil, and most of the remainder from natural gas.

“The current rate of revenue is unprecedented, because prices are unprecedented, and export volumes are close to their highest levels on record,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst who led the center’s research.

In other words, the Russians are getting richer than ever on their oil and gas exports. How, exactly, is our oil ban hurting them? It’s not! But it’s hurting consumers in the US and Europe, and will do so indefinitely. We are plunging into recession because of all this. Do you think that the Biden administration cares? Watch this:

 

CNN: “What do you say to those families that say, ‘listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years?’”

BIDEN ADVISOR BRIAN DEESE: “This is about the future of the Liberal World Order and we have to stand firm.” pic.twitter.com/LWilWSo72S

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 1, 2022

Yeah, why don’t you ask the working people struggling to fill up their cars how much they care about The Future Of The Liberal World Order. The unhappy fact is that Russia is going to win this war, and our oil and gas boycotts are not only not hurting Russia, but helping it get richer while impoverishing our own peoples. What sense does that make? In May, the governor of the Bank of England — the equivalent in the US to the head of the Federal Reserve — warned of “apocalyptic” food shortages coming later this year, as Ukraine produces 27 percent of the world’s wheat, but can’t export it because of the war. Like most people, I hate Russia’s war on Ukraine, but again, is it worth our own people going hungry to prevent Russia from prevailing in a war it will inevitably win anyway?

We Americans — with the possible exception of those who lived through the Great Depression — have never had to deal with food shortages. It’s hard to figure what that will do to our politics. Talking heads like Joe Biden and his advisors who gas on about the sanctity of the Liberal World Order are going to have to do a lot of explaining to hungry, angry American consumers — as will Biden’s EU counterparts.

You can’t eat the Liberal World Order. You can’t power your car or heat your home with the Liberal World Order. If Ukraine stood a reasonable chance of beating Russia, maybe — maybe — it would be worth the sacrifice. But that’s not going to happen, and as soon as US and European publics get sick and tired of being impoverished so Joe Biden and Ursula Van Der Leyen can give Vladimir Putin the finger, Western political support for Ukraine’s struggle will collapse.

You don’t have to be pro-Putin to see that. You just have to take off the rose-colored glasses. Ukraine has given the Russians a hell of a fight, and good for them for doing so. But it was always a David vs. Goliath battle. Now is the time to find some way toward peace, before economic and food catastrophes shake the foundations of the Liberal World Order at home.

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Toronto Cops Look For Bearded ‘Woman’

Last last night I returned from taping an interview with Jordan Peterson for his podcast. It was quite a thrill. He’s a powerful and intense figure, as you know, but he was really curious about my work, and respectful. I felt honored. It’s going to be up next Thursday. We spent the whole interview talking about my book Live Not By Lies. 

While I was waiting for the interview to start, a friend sent me this tweet by the Toronto Police:

News Release – Missing Woman, Ryerson Avenue and Bathurst Street area, Isobella Degrace, 27https://t.co/JB42sCtzxY pic.twitter.com/SO1VNr16NY

— Toronto Police (@TorontoPolice) June 30, 2022

I know, I know: what a bunch of dumbasses our ruling class is. But this is actually far more sinister. From Live Not By Lies:

In retrospect, this seems almost unbelievable. How could the Russians have been so blind? It was, in a sense, a problem of the imagination. Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.

The point is not that that the Toronto Police folly is the same as the state crushing a prisoner’s genitals. The point is that people have no idea how quickly things they don’t imagine could happen actually can come to pass. If you had told intellectuals in the 1990s that within thirty to forty years, the police force of a major world city would be sending out a tweet like that with a straight face — and that for the cops to fail to do so would be a crime in that jurisdiction — well, those intellectuals would have thought this was hysterical Religious-Right propaganda designed to divide us. It would never happen, they would have confidently predicted.

This brings us to this second passage from Live Not By Lies:

As [Hannah] Arendt warned more than half a century ago:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

This comment under the tweet I put up about the Toronto cops’ idiocy is a perfect example of a Wheedling Liberal:

The police department of a major world city tweeting out an alert to look out for a “woman” who looks like that bloke is not an “obscure anecdote,” but rather the sign that something has gone terribly wrong in a society.

Don’t forget these lines from Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

The Toronto Police force, agents of the State, tells you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. This is the most essential command of Wokeness. When you have an entire nation that has learned to do that, or at least has learned to collaborate with that insanity without protest, you have a nation that can be convinced to accept just about anything. That police tweet is a sign of our times. Why do people submit to this? Don’t they understand that they are laying the groundwork, culturally and psychologically, for their own total domination by lies?

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Snowballs Of Soft Totalitarianism

This piece by the liberal NYT columnist Tom Edsall is the most hopeful thing I’ve read in a while. In it, he details how so many left-wing activist organizations are tearing each other apart internally over wokeness. Excerpt:

There has been a burst of stories in recent weeks describing devastating internal conflicts within progressive organizations, the most conspicuous of which was Ryan Grim’s June 13 Intercept piece, “Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.”

Grim’s assessment resonated across the internet and was quickly followed by Molly Redden’s June 17 HuffPost account, “Inside the A.C.L.U.’s Post-Trump Reckoning”; Jon Gabriel’s article in the Arizona Republic on June 18, “Who needs a right-wing plot when progressives are busy eating themselves alive?”; Zack Colman’s June 19 Politico column, “Justice or overreach? As crucial test looms, Big Greens are under fire”; and John Harris’s June 23 Politico essay, “The Left Goes to War with Itself.”

According to Grim (and those other reports), disputes over diversity, equity and inclusion — over doctrine, language and strategies — have paralyzed much of the left advocacy and nonprofit sector.

William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, has a sharp eye for what’s not working in Washington and has long been a critic of those he feels are pulling the Democratic Party too far to the left. Galston emailed me his take on the current situation:

In recent months I’ve had the chance to talk to several presidents and executive directors of established left-leaning centers and groups. They all tell versions of the same story:

Around 2015, something changed. The young people they were hiring were focused on issues of race, gender, and identity as never before, and they were impatient with — even scornful of — what they regarded as the timid incrementalism of the organizations’ leaders. They wanted equity (as they defined it) immediately. They were acutely sensitive to what they saw as microaggressions, including the use of terms to identify different groups that they regarded as out of date and insulting. They were prickly, quick to take offense and to see malign motives rather than inadvertent mistakes.

This generation gap has forced leaders to devote unprecedented time and energy to internal governance, sometimes to the detriment of their organization’s mission. The left has a long tradition of turning on itself, and what I’ve reported is the latest chapter in a long running saga.

One high-ranking nonprofit official who has been in the middle of these battles, but who declined to be identified because of the repercussions he would face within his organization, commented by email:

Difficulties addressing D.E.I. issues and identity politics are part of the problem, but they are symptoms as much as causes. There’s a new perfectionism in our organizations that gets in the way of actually dealing with challenges in our imperfect world.

The fundamental problem, he wrote, is “the presence in every progressive organization of a small but very vocal fringe that views every problem as a sin.” This hyper-moralization of internal disputes spills over into real-world but otherwise routine disagreements, he continued: “It has become too easy for people to conflate disagreements about issues with matters of identity.”

Every leader of a nonprofit organization, he contended, “is struggling with the same problems regardless of the race, gender, or identity of the leader.”

You love to see it.

There’s more:

The current factional difficulties on the left bring to mind the work of Richard Ellis, a professor of political science at Willamette University and a liberal, who wrote the 1998 book “The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America.” Ellis described the transformation of the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society:

“How did S.D.S. move from the nonviolence of the Port Huron Statement to the violent fantasies of the Days of Rage?” Ellis asked.

Answering his own question, Ellis argued:

The impulse to effect social changes was increasingly pre-empted and distorted by a desire to retain an uncorrupted honesty or purity. The S.D.S. worldview increasingly became one of “us” versus “them,” the good inside versus the evil outside.

A similar process overtook two subsequent movements, in Ellis’s view:

Characteristic of both radical feminism and radical environmentalism is the tendency to dismiss the choices people make as a product of false consciousness. Under conditions of inequality, Catharine MacKinnon insists, female consent is merely male coercion concealed. Driving a car, radical environmentalists tell us, is an “addiction,” not a real choice.

Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and author of the book “Whiteshift” (and who pointed me to Ellis’s book), argued by email that a key element in the struggle of progressive groups “is the elevation of emotion and the personal over reason, generalizable data and process.”

Read the whole thing. It’s a good column. The best quote is from Steven Pinker, who says that the entire crisis is built on the woke Left’s belief that progress comes from Good defeating Evil (as opposed to problem-solving), and its false assumption about equality: that the only reason for unequal results is bigotry. Pinker calls this “an algorithm for infinite recrimination because of an iron law of social science: nothing ever mirrors the demographic statistics of a nation.”

Edsall goes on to talk about how, when people of color rise to positions of leadership, but struggle to succeed in them, the only reason (from the woke perspective) for this has to be institutional racism that hasn’t yet been identified and eliminated. No Social Justice Warrior can ever entertain the idea that that particular minority simply might not be very good at his or her job. I once worked in a professional environment in which a BIPOC was given a plum job far above their experience, and who failed spectacularly.

Everyone in the office was expected to avert their eyes from the humiliating disaster of this person’s professional flame-out. Plus, the rest of us had to take on extra work — this person’s work — to give this person “the chance to succeed.” Most of the people I worked with were liberals, but they had earned their positions by hard work and experience, and did not appreciate being compelled to do not only their own work, but somebody else’s, in service to a false philosophy of egalitarianism. When the BIPOC employee eventually burned out, I felt bad for this person, who was young, because they might have succeeded in time, by working themself through the ranks, like everybody else, if the (all-white) upper management hadn’t insisted that only a BIPOC should be hired for that job, and this person was promoted far beyond their ability to do the job — only because of the color of their skin.

This particular issue caused a lot of internal grumbling on the team, eventually among the white liberals, who eventually could not ignore the evidence of their own eyes. But this appointment was part of a broader push within the organization to elevate BIPOCs and other minorities, regardless of the quality of their work. I remember arguing with someone in the office (a white person) who supported this move, and who said, in all sincerity, that “diversity is a component of quality.” No it’s not! A crap piece of writing does not somehow become good because the person who wrote it is a BIPOC, gay, or female. But this is the corrupt principle behind the “decolonizing” of college courses and libraries.

George Orwell, in Animal Farm, understood well the dynamic at work in these situations. When reality fails to conform to ideological principles, then the ideologue has to find a scapegoat to blame:

If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal.

“White supremacy,” “whiteness,” and “institutional racism” are the Snowballs of soft totalitarianism.

So, it’s a very good thing that these maniacs are eating each other alive. This is the time for the Right to get its act together and fight back hard, on every front, against these lunatics. It’s not going to be easy, given that they have captured every institution. But their ideology is incapable of dealing with reality, and produces nothing but failure, resentment, and conflict. This is what they are doing to our country. Joe Biden’s vision, rather than being a sensible center-left governing plan, has elevated identity politics to the first rank. There is no way to keep a country as diverse as America together if its leadership is guided by this kind of insanity.

Here’s the thing: it is not enough to defeat them politically. We have to build up something positive to replace wokeness.

Yesterday, after I wrote the blog post about Viktor Orban as “defender of the normies,” I ran into a friend who has done academic work on the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, and wanted to talk to me about doing a book on Patočka for a non-academic audience. The only thing I know about Patočka is that he was a courageous anti-communist dissident intellectual persecuted by the Communist regime. That, and a phrase of Patočka’s that I first encountered in reading Roger Scruton: “the solidarity of the shattered” (or “of the shaken,” depending on your translator). Here is an explanation of the concept:

“When Jan Patocka wrote about Charter 77, he used the term ‘solidarity of the shaken’. He was thinking of those who dared resist impersonal power and to confront it with the only thing at their disposal, their own humanity.”

With this observation Václav Havel refers to an essential idea developed in one of the final works of the Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, in which Patočka analyses the meaning of war in the twentieth century. It is precisely in this text that Patočka introduces the idea of “solidarity of the shaken”, meaning with it a particular bond that originates between people who have experienced a strong disturbance of the certainties, big and small, that hold their lives in place.

The “shaken” is an individual whose everyday assurances have been overturned by a deeply shocking experience, which allows them to change their perspective on life. From Patočka’s point of view, the shaken are “those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about”[2], as they have regained the true meaning of their own life through the experience of an actual danger. By rediscovering the meaning of their death, human beings can also understand what life really is, i.e. something that cannot be restricted to ordinary every day experience, or limited to mere facts.

“The solidarity of the shaken is built up in persecution and uncertainty: that is its front line, quiet, without fanfare or sensation even there where this aspect of the ruling Force seeks to seize it.”

These words remind us of the meaning of the dissident action engendered by Charter 77, as its signatories themselves defined it. Indeed, Havel and Patočka have highlighted the concept of a pure solidarity, experienced in a disturbing moment, which has guided them to a deep sense of sharing and loyalty. They have consciously chosen to leave the safe ground of everydayness in order to live a dangerous experience which allows them to create a new kind of commonality. Czechoslovakian dissidents were shaken persons, living a life exposed to danger and “problematicity”. Havel, Patočka and all the signatories of Charter 77 followed the direction of an ethical, critical and essential choice, which created a strong solidarity despite the differences existing between these people.

I am eager for a populist conservative leader who can help those shattered or shaken by the malign use of woke power, to build an alliance to drive them out of power, and to replace them with a more just order. Reading this about Patočka helps me to understand better what the Czech dissident Kamila Bendova meant when she explained to me why it was necessary (and easy) for her and her late husband, Vaclav Benda, to collaborate closely with all the hippie atheists in the Charter 77 movement, even though the Bendas were political and religious conservatives. She told me that when you are faced with totalitarianism, the rarest quality to find in others is courage. Havel and the hippies had it; most Christians, despite sharing religious convictions with the Catholic Bendas, did not. The Bendas leaned into solidarity of the shaken with the hippies who had been persecuted for their beliefs — one of their number was even a Trotskyist! — rather than the superficial solidarity with fellow Christians who kept their heads down for the sake of safety.

Similarly, we religious and social conservatives should form coalitions with brave anti-woke gay public intellectuals like Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray, rather than impose our own purity tests. All of us who have been shaken by conflict with wokeness in power must recognize that we share that in common. Whatever our differences — and they are meaningful differences — we are united in our opposition to these unjust and insane totalitarians. We can and must work out a new way of cooperating and living together with our differences, based on our shared experience of injustice at the hands of woke ideology.

The work remains to be done. One of the common criticisms heard after last autumn’s National Conservatism conference in Orlando was that the only thing holding us together was a shared loathing of wokeness. That’s a fair criticism, but that only means that we have creative and constructive labor ahead of us. We know what we don’t want — but what do we want? The refusal of a coercive, moralistic, radical egalitarian ideology — wokeness — is a good basis on which to discuss and negotiate among ourselves. And — crucially — witnessing the purity clashes destroying woke institutions now is a clear sign to us on the Right that we need to avoid the same. Though I hold moral views far to the Right of many people, I don’t want to live in a right-wing version of Wokeistan.

Douglas Murray’s remarks earlier this year, asking what it is about the Right that makes it so unattractive, are worth pondering. I am religious, and Murray, who is gay, is not. Our views on homosexuality are irreconcilable. But I know that my views are unpopular today; as a matter of practical politics, I would be willing to enter into a compromise in which we have a public order that makes a place for gay people, including civil partnerships, in exchange for robust religious liberty — including the right of religious institutions to be left alone by LGBT crusaders. I am not willing to allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good enough for now. What makes me still a classical liberal, however weak, is my hatred of bullies and the mob; I am in favor, deep down, of the right to be left alone.

We on the religious and social Right simply have to face the fact that on the gay question, we have lost the culture war, and that if we are going to protect our institutions, and our own religious liberty, we are going to have to reach a modus vivendi with gay conservatives and gay classical liberals who oppose us religious believers, but who don’t want to smash us. I’m not sure what that compromise would look like, but those conversations ought to be happening now (though probably not in public). Camille Paglia, who is outspokenly lesbian and atheist, once famously said that her fellow gays should be careful about attacking the Church. She points out that historically speaking, homosexuality has only flourished under conditions of advanced civilization. Like it or not, the Church is a pillar of civilization. Gays, according to Paglia, may think they are triumphing by attacking the Church, but in fact they may be undermining the conditions under which they can thrive. I would like to know more about that thesis.

Let me make this more concrete. If you haven’t watched Matt Walsh’s documentary What Is A Woman?, you really must. What makes it so brilliant is the simplicity of the concept: he simply asks leading lights of the gender ideology/trans movement to define “woman”. They can’t do it. This is a question that 99 percent of humanity had no problem answering until the day before yesterday. It’s a question that most of humanity still has no problem answering, but the power of the gender ideologues has cowed all those in professional circles into silence.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote (not by name) a physician in a major American hospital who told me that the hospital administration had ordered all the staff to give anybody who showed up wanting cross-sex hormones or surgical intervention what they wanted, no questions asked. This, even if it violated the physicians’ best judgment about what was good for that particular patient. Moreover, the doctor told me that the Human Resources department at the hospital monitored the social media feeds of all the doctors, to make sure none of them tweeted, Facebooked, or Instagrammed anything problematic. This is how far these crazies are willing to go to impose their ideology.

When you watch Walsh’s movie, you may feel shock that the rest of us have allowed such lunatics to achieve so much power. What Walsh does in that documentary is what ordinary journalists ought to have been doing years earlier, if American journalism had not been captured by ideologues. There is tremendous opportunity for politicians of the Right to build on the common-sense courage seen in Walsh’s documentary. Similarly, Mrs. DK, a semi-regular commenter here, is a Christian who talks about the solidarity of the shaken she has found with atheists and others not like her, all of whom have had their children captured by gender ideology, such that the kids have undertaken medicalized sex changes. Whatever our differences — religious, political, etc. — the threat to our children should bring us all together to stop the ideologues.

More broadly, as we see in the Edsall piece, if we don’t stop these people while we can, any basis for us to live together peacefully as people in a diverse country will be destroyed. The vicious infighting that they have brought to the organizations they control will be made general, given their control over big social institutions. Wokeness has captured the US military. What happens when our soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Balkanized from the top, turn tribal, and then on each other? We would be facing an existential question for our nation.

So, to end: the Right has to press its advantage hard now, against the woke in disarray, to dismantle their hold on our institutions, and cast their malignant ideology out of the public square. But it also has to build on the solidarity of those shaken by wokeness, to create (or reclaim) a positive social and political order. What I personally can’t figure out is if this means a return to classical liberalism, or if it really is true that classical liberalism got us into this mess. I tend to believe that classical liberalism got us into this mess, but I also don’t know if it’s possible to rebuild a binding social settlement without a shared source of authority. In other words, I don’t know if a stable liberalism is possible without Christianity. I doubt it, but I am willing to hear arguments. It ought to be obvious that the Catholic integralist project is a total non-starter, absent conversion. A non-Catholic Christian like me could only see this as a form of tyranny. I would unquestionably prefer to live under that kind of tyranny than woke tyranny. But I wonder: is the only realistic option open to us some form of tyranny? If liberalism really is dead, what else is there?

Lots to think about. Hey, good news: I’ve been invited by Jordan Peterson onto his podcast, to discuss Live Not By Lies. I will be recording the episode later today. So glad to finally connect with Dr. Peterson.

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The Pope, Pelosi, Eucharist

This is really something. It happened in Rome earlier this afternoon:

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Pope Francis on Wednesday and received Communion during a papal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, witnesses said, despite her position in support of abortion rights.

Pelosi attended the morning Mass marking the feasts of St. Peter and St. Paul, during which Francis bestowed the woolen pallium stole on newly consecrated archbishops. She was seated in a VIP diplomatic section of the basilica and received Communion along with the rest of the congregants, according to two people who witnessed the moment.

Pelosi’s home archbishop, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, has said he will no longer allow her to receive the sacrament in his archdiocese because of her support for abortion rights. Cordileone, a conservative, has said Pelosi must either repudiate her support for abortion or stop speaking publicly of her Catholic faith.

Pelosi has done neither. She called the recent Supreme Court ruling removing constitutional protections for abortion an “outrageous and heart-wrenching” decision that fulfils the Republican Party’s “dark and extreme goal of ripping away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions.”

So, Pope Francis overrules Pelosi’s own bishop, and gives her communion just days after the Dobbs decision, which, as the AP reports, she denounced in vivid terms.

Of course this Pope has a rather liberal view of these things. From a transcript of his press conference on the flight back from his visit to Hungary and Slovakia last fall:

O’Connell: You have often said that we are all sinners, and that the Eucharist is not a reward for the perfect but a medicine and food for the weak. As you know, in the USA after the last elections, there was a discussion among the bishops about giving communion to politicians who supported abortion laws, and there are bishops who want to deny communion to the president and other officials. Some bishops are in favourable, others say not to use the Eucharist as a weapon. What do you think and what do you advise the bishops to do? And have you as a bishop in all these years publicly refused the Eucharist to anyone?

Pope Francis:I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone; I don’t know if anyone has come in these conditions! This even as a priest. I have never been conscious of having a person like the one you describe in front of me, that is true. [Emphasis mine — RD] The only time I’ve ever had a nice thing happen was when I went to serve Mass in an old people’s home, I was in the living room, and I said: who wants Communion? All the old people raised their hands. One little old lady raised her hand and took Communion and said: “Thank you, I’m Jewish” And I said: “What I gave you is Jewish too!”

Communion is not a prize for the perfect – think of Jansenism – Communion is a gift, a present, it is the presence of Jesus in the Church and in the community. Then, those who are not in the community cannot take Communion, like this Jewish lady, but the Lord wanted to reward her without my knowledge. Out of the community – ex-communicated – because they are not baptised or have drifted away.

The second problem, that of abortion: it’s more than a problem, it’s homicide, whoever has an abortion, kills. No mincing words. [Emphasis mine — RD] Take any book on embryology for medical students. The third week after conception, all the organs are already there, even the DNA… it is a human life, this human life must be respected, this principle is so clear! To those who cannot understand, I would ask this question: Is it right to kill a human life to solve a problem? Is it right to hire a hitman to kill a human life? Scientifically, it is a human life. Is it right to take it out to solve a problem? That is why the Church is so harsh on this issue, because if it accepts this, it is as if it accepts daily murder. A Head of State told me that the demographic decline began because in those years there was such a strong law on abortion that six million abortions were performed and this left a decline in births in the society of that country.

Now we go to that person who is not in the community, who cannot receive Communion. And this is not a punishment, he is outside. But the problem is not theological, it is pastoral, how we bishops manage this principle pastorally. And if we look at the history of the Church, we will see that every time the bishops have not dealt with a problem as pastors, they have taken sides on a political front. Think of the night of St Bartholomew’s, “Heretics, yes, let’s cut their throats!… Think of the witch-hunts… of Campo di Fiori, of Savonarola. When the Church defends a principle, when it does so in a non-pastoral manner, it takes sides on a political level, and this has always been the case, just look at history. What must the pastor do? Be a pastor, don’t go condemning. Be a pastor, because he is a pastor also for the excommunicated. Pastors with God’s style, which is closeness, compassion, and tenderness. The whole Bible says so. A pastor who does not know how to act as a pastor… I am not very familiar with the details of the United States… But if you’re close, tender, and give communion? It’s a hypothesis. The pastor knows what to do at all times. But if you go beyond the pastoral dimension of the Church, you become a politician, and you can see this in all the non-pastoral condemnations of the Church… If you say you can give or not give, this is casuistry… Remember the storm that was whipped up with Amoris laetitia? “Heresy, heresy!” Fortunately, Cardinal Schoenborn, a great theologian, was there, he clarified things… They are children of God and they need our pastoral closeness, then the pastor resolves things as the Spirit indicates to him.

I don’t understand this position at all. Francis clearly believes that abortion is murder. He also says he has never denied communion to anyone, and that he has never knowingly had a politician who favors abortion present themselves for communion. Well, it happened today at the Vatican, and there is no way he can plausibly claim to have been in the dark about Nancy Pelosi’s stance.

He communed a politician who believes that the Supreme Court’s finding that there is nothing in the US Constitution that constitutes a right to kill the unborn is an outrage. It sounds like Francis’s bottom line is that anybody who is in the Catholic Church has a right to receive communion. What is the point of confession, then? If you can receive communion despite having unconfessed sins, what does this do to the rite of confession?

In the Orthodox Church in America, my wife and I are not permitted to receive Communion now because of our pending divorce proceedings. I don’t like it, especially because I did not initiate the divorce, but those are the rules. They aren’t meant to punish us; they are meant to underscore the profound significance of holy communion. In some Orthodox jurisdictions — I believe the Antiochians are like this — believers are kept away from the chalice for six months after the marriage has been dissolved by the Church. I think we can argue about the pastoral wisdom of all this in good faith, but I greatly appreciate how the disciplines of the Orthodox churches underscore how serious they take Eucharistic theology — this, even when those disciplines are being used against me.

Let me ask you readers who attend churches where the Eucharist is offered: does your priest or parish ever refuse the Eucharist to anybody? Or is it understood that anybody is welcome to receive, under any conditions? Whatever your church’s policy, do you think it’s a good policy, or not?

I do believe that stricter policies are better. I agree with the Pope that the Eucharist is medicine for sinners, but the ability of the medicine to work inner healing depends on the internal disposition of the recipient. A person who is guilty of serious sin, but is not repentant? The “medicine” is wasted on that sort of person, I think. This is why the Catholic and Orthodox churches insist on confession (which entails repentance) before receiving communion. To separate receiving the Eucharist from confession (and repentance) is to do violence to the meaning of the Eucharist, I believe.

This conflict between the Pope and the Archbishop of San Francisco reminds me of the e-mail I received from a reader who taught religion in a Catholic high school in the South. He wrote after Francis said his “who am I to judge?” remarks about homosexuality. The teacher said that he had worked hard, for a long time, to explain the Church’s teaching to his students, and in a single ill-chosen phrase, Francis had destroyed all of his work. He told me that his students said that the Pope doesn’t think it’s a big deal, so why should they? Similarly, how can priests and educators teach young Catholics the meaning of the Eucharist if the pontiff himself doesn’t seem to care who receives it, beyond them being at least nominally Catholic?

And: to what extent does the Pope doing this, in contravention of the San Francisco Archbishop’s ruling, constitute a meaningful split between him and Archbishop Cordileone? Catholic priests, canonists, and theologians who read this blog, help me out here.

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Defender Of The Normies

I’m still pissed off by that crap New Yorker story about US conservatives and Hungary. All of us who know anything about Hungary know that we should not expect a positive story about Viktor Orban’s government in the Western media. The best we can hope for is something that is fair and nuanced. Based on past experience with other New Yorker writers, I thought I could expect that from the New Yorker. That’s why I went out on a limb to open doors for the writer that wouldn’t have opened otherwise, because the pro-Orban Hungarians have learned from painful experience not to trust journalists. No, I said, the New Yorker is serious. Yes, it’s liberal, but I think they will be open to reporting things that don’t fit the standard left-wing narrative. I put my credibility on the line, and boy, do I feel stupid. Never again will I help any Western journalist with the Hungarians.

“I’m disappointed in what he wrote,” texted one of my Hungarian sources, who talked to the reporter. “He could have written the same shit staying in NY.” True. You don’t have to like Viktor Orban at all to recognize that the Orban phenomenon is a lot more interesting than what the ideologically-driven liberal Western journalists say. You might be tired of me writing about Orban, but I’m telling you, the things in play here matter a lot to the US political scene, and will increasingly do so. From my perspective, the things that make Orban interesting and instructive for US conservatives are:

He recognizes that “liberalism” is not liberal anymore, and that the left-controlled institutions have no interest at all in playing fair with those who disagree with them. And he doesn’t give a rat’s rear end what they say about him. He fights, and he fights intelligently. Which is why he’s effective.He is socially conservative but economically more to the Left than Republicans. That is, he’s a real populist.He believes in national sovereignty, not globalism. He’s not opposed to transnational alliances and organizations, but he believes that it’s important for people to keep and defend their own traditions and ways of life. That entails controlling immigration.

The core of it, I think, is that Orban realizes that the deck is stacked against the deplorables, and makes himself their champion. European leaders went berserk last summer when Orban’s government enacted a law preventing LGBT propaganda aimed at children and minors. But Orban looks at what’s happening in the West, where so many kids are calling themselves queer, and demanding hormones and surgery, and where all of this came about amid a propaganda blitz, and he says NO, we will not have this in our country. 

A reader writes:

American conservatives have to go to Hungary looking for authentic conservative leadership because too many of our own are grifters (see Trump, Donald J.), carnival barkers, or controlled opposition (see Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson’s strange new love for Pride, or Bush speechwriter David Frum’s opposition to actually overturning Roe v. Wade, which I believe was a stated goal of the administration her served). This is why the populist Right in Europe is sucking all the energy out of the established Right parties in Europe, e.g., France.

Notice how all the “world order” types are in rigid lockstep denouncing the end of Roe, calling it a threat to democracy, and all the rest. Social and religious conservatives really are strangers in a strange land now. What most of us knew already is now completely undeniable: abortion and LGBT are now absolutely sacrosanct, and any social conservative who opposes them must be shouted down and marginalized. Name just one area where it would be acceptable to draw limits, just one! You can’t. As far as they are concerned, this is what the Western world order stands for, and what it must now uphold and defend: abortion, sodomy, and sex changes, including for children.

To which my own view is: good luck with that. You have now raised several generations on hating the West. You have a completely atomized society, and are basically running on money and branding as the vultures gather. You will notice how all of the easy-win triumphalism on Ukraine has gradually faded as Western interest has waned and Russia’s gradual gains have continued. Expect to see a lot more of that in the coming years.

Here’s the thing that you never, ever read about Hungary in the Western media, but that you notice as soon as you spend any time there: the whole country seems like a middle-American city circa 1985. If you are a liberal person, you might find that unpleasant, but it ain’t fascism. I had introduced the New Yorker writer to Mark Bollobas, who grew up in the UK and US, the son of Hungarian parents who fled Communism. He moved to his parents’ homeland a decade or so ago, because he wanted to start a family, and he had lost faith in a future for him in either America or Britain. He hated the inequality, the violence, and the instability of the US and the UK (including the speed with which the culture in the UK was changing because of mass immigration). In Hungary, though he is poorer than he would have been back home (salaries here are low), he is much happier. He now has a wife and two kids. He spent an evening explaining to the reporter why he made the move.

It’s not a move for everybody, but Mark’s perspective — which I know, because he’s a friend of mine, and because he wrote about it at length here — is really interesting. Shouldn’t a reporter trying to figure out why conservatives like Orban be interested in that sort of thing? Last summer when I was here, I talked to a young woman, at the time a Danube Institute colleague (she has since moved on), who is not religious, and was living with her boyfriend. She was 100 percent behind Orban in part because, as she put it, “I don’t want to raise kids in a country where they are told that they might be of the opposite sex.” Simple as that. Many liberals today cannot fathom a world in which parents might find it horrifying that their sons could claim to be girls, and the entire established order — the state, the media, medicine, corporations, law — is lined up to sever the child from his given sex, and from his parents.

Viktor Orban says no, not on my watch. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw the enacting of the law forbidding discussing sexuality with little children in Florida public schools, and punched back hard against the groomer Walt Disney Company when it tried to raise hell about it — that was pure Orban. Imagine a Republican governor daring to stand up to woke capitalism and the LGBT media colossus! DeSantis 2022 is not Mike Pence 2015, who, as Indiana governor, collapsed on the religious freedom restoration law when woke capitalists roared in opposition.

I’ve mentioned in this space before that a visiting American friend told me, after two weeks in Budapest, that as best he can tell, Orban’s Hungary is a lot like Mayor Daley’s Chicago. It’s run by a political machine dominated by a charismatic leader, but it is certainly a machine that can be voted out of office when it stops delivering for the people. The Pendergast family in Kansas City ran a similar machine a hundred years ago; it’s how Harry S Truman got his start in politics. Huey P. Long ran a similar machine in Louisiana.

My late father was a conservative voter all his life, but he wouldn’t hear a bad word said against Huey Long. Born in the Great Depression into rural poverty, my dad told me that if it hadn’t been for Gov. Long and his successors — crooks though they were — poor people like his family would have continued to be screwed by the oligarchs that ran Louisiana. The choice they had was not between good government and bad government; the choice they had was between crooked government that looked out for the interests of the poor and working class, or crooked government that benefited the rich.

Similarly today: there is no such thing as clean politics in the former Communist bloc, of either Left or Right. Corruption is just how things get done. The question is, does the government deliver overall for its people? Had the New Yorker reporter bothered to talk to people who didn’t share his views, he would have had no trouble finding people here who are fed up with what they consider to be the Orban clique helping each other out, but who vote Orban anyway because they believe he has the best interests of Hungary in mind, and actually delivers for them. These are people who do not want Brussels to tell them that they have to subject their children to genderqueer propaganda, and that they have to open their borders to foreign mass immigration. As one young female voter told me last summer, she doesn’t like the Orban-style corruption, but she planned to vote for him anyway in the next election, because the moral and intellectual corruption that comes from western Europe (she was talking about gender ideology) is the kind that will destroy a people. She’s right.

One more thing. Jeremiah Daws is an Evangelical Christian who worked for years as a creative at Walt Disney. He lived in the closet there — in the closet as a Christian — because he feared what would happen if people in that oh-so-tolerant, diversity-and-inclusivity company would do if they knew what he really believed. He left the company not long ago, and when the Dobbs decision came down, overturning Roe, he went public on social media with his profession of faith.

Today I celebrate the overturning of Roe V Wade. It’s a huge win for America. About 10 years ago, a man I greatly admired in the film business told me to keep my pro-life, Christian, and conservative views to myself or I’d be blackballed in the industry.

— Jeremiah Daws (@JeremiahDaws) June 24, 2022

It did not go well for him. Read on:

It has been a couple of days since I finally voiced my pro-life opinions after hiding them for 10 years. Some reactions have been civil. Most have not. 1/9

— Jeremiah Daws (@JeremiahDaws) June 27, 2022

You want to know where Viktor Orban comes from? He speaks for — and defends — people like Jeremiah Daws. People who are sick and tired of being pushed around by the powerful people in this society, told that they are horrible people for the views they hold, and deserve contempt and punishment, no matter how kind and compassionate they might be.

He’s for the normies, in other words. He’s for the people who are tired of being told that they should be ashamed of their country and its traditions, and that things would be so much better if foreigners immigrated here to improve it by displacing the original “bigots” whose ancestors settled here. He’s for the people who are sick and tired of woke Big Business, and woke educators, trashing the normies. A young Hungarian woman told me recently that at university in Budapest, all her professors went on and on about how horrible the Orban government is, even if it had nothing at all to do with the subject of the class. She couldn’t grasp their obsession. Told me it’s all they wanted to talk about. She is a practicing Catholic who actually approves of the government, but she was too intimidated by the bullying of her professors to say anything in class.

But the voting booth is private. This is why Orban wins. And this is why a Republican presidential candidate who can figure Orban out and deduce how to apply his insights to the American scene — which is significantly different from Hungary, which is mono-ethnic — will win in 2024. And this is why the American and western European journalistic class will continue to be shocked. They don’t see what they don’t want to see. I’m never going to help another one see it, either. The Hungarians at CPAC didn’t want to let western media in, because they didn’t see any reason to help out the people they knew would come in and write lies about them. I thought they were mistaken. They weren’t; I was.

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Trump Behind The Wheel

Crazy stuff in Washington today at the January 6th hearings. Take a look at this clip of Gen. Mike Flynn refusing to answer whether he believes in the peaceful transfer of power in the US, by taking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. My God, this guy. This retired three-star general.

President Trump thought Mike Pence deserved to be hanged, according to testimony from Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

Hutchinson in this clip tells a jaw-dropping story about how President Trump tried to grab the wheel of the presidential limousine when his driver refused to take him to the Capitol to join the mob there. I suppose she could be lying, but I don’t think so. What’s in it for her to lie? This sounds in character for Trump, too.

What do you even say to that? This is batsh*t crazy! A man as insane as that was once President of the United States. It’s like something out of a bad Hollywood movie.

This man needs to be sent away. He did some good things, but he cannot hold power again.

UPDATE: To be fair, she’s not being challenged. She could be lying. I wish I thought she was lying.

UPDATE.2: And yet! Look at the insane, immoral man who is now in the White House:

The website the White House highlighted includes information for minors, children "15 or younger," on how they can bypass parental notification laws. https://t.co/7vbKofIY7K

— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) June 28, 2022

UPDATE.3: A contrary view, one that says Secret Service agents are prepared to testify under oath that what Cassidy Hutchinson says happened never did. More:

I noted in this afternoon’s post that the January 6 committee has already interviewed Engel. Maggie Haberman reports that they interviewed Ornato too, many months ago. I assumed they had already corroborated the details of the SUV incident with the two of them and were having Hutchinson tell her story today in anticipation of Engel and Ornato telling it themselves in future testimony. Otherwise, why the hell would they have Hutchinson pass on a story second-hand on national television which might not bear out under scrutiny, causing it to blow up in their faces?

I assumed too much, it seems. And as others have noted, it *is* strange that this explosive account of what happened in the vehicle never once leaked in 17 months before today.

Much depends on Ornato now. If he testifies that he told Hutchinson about the SUV incident but got his facts wrong somehow — maybe he heard a rumor second-hand himself and irresponsibly passed it along — then Hutchinson’s credibility is intact. It’s the committee’s credibility that will be badly damaged, having allowed a witness to share a bombshell allegation that they hadn’t personally corroborated. That would be a disaster, but not a major disaster inasmuch as the SUV incident wasn’t the important testimony that Hutchinson gave today. The important stuff was when she claimed to have heard firsthand Trump say backstage at the January 6 rally that he didn’t care if his supporters were bringing weapons to the rally because he knew they weren’t meant for him.

Whatever. I’m sick of the craziness of Trump, and just want a conservative president who believes what Trump believes (or said he did), but who can be counted on to be a damn grown-up, and spare us the drama.

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